


"Don't move"

by sshysmm



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Book 1: Game of Kings, Gen, Memory Loss, Music, Recovery, Sym as guide dog, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, road accident mention, the band Au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2021-01-26 21:48:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21381112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: Francis wakes up in a strange place, being serenaded by an excellent guitarist.--Written for Whumptober 2019, set in the Band AU I've been writing (see collections).--There's 31 of these ficlets and I apologise profusely for burying other work in the tags. I will *always* tag these as 'the band au' and you can usethis nifty extension (ao3rdr)to block the tag if this isn't your thing and isn't what you want to see in the Lymond tags!
Kudos: 5
Collections: Ficlets in the Lymond Band AU for Whumptober 2019





	"Don't move"

**Author's Note:**

> [Originally posted to tumblr, 12 October 2019.](https://notasapleasure.tumblr.com/post/188296602634/whumptober-12)

Their playing was beautiful. Based around classical Flamenco riffs, the music filled the room like a gentle breeze, floating above his aching head and fluttering towards the bright light of - he presumed - a window. His fingers twitched jealously as he listened, and he let his eyes stay closed so as to appreciate the precision of the technique, the deceptively easy sound of the _toque pasqueño_.

He had no idea where he was, or who the musician could be. In addition, bruises from some recent injury throbbed deep in his hip and ribs, but their cause was another thing he could not, at present, remember. This out to have been more worrying than it was, only the sensations of the moment remained overwhelmingly pleasant.

He had been placed on an extravagantly soft mattress and the room smelled of clean linen overlaid by a woman’s heather-spiced perfume. Indeed, the guitarist at last could not resist the duet with her instrument and began to hum alongside the tune she played. There was something familiar and reassuring in the rich tones of her voice.

Carefully, he tried to move his legs, and when his body met with resistance he felt panic threaten to submerge him: was he paralysed?

Something grunted and the music stopped, the silence reaching out in expectation.

“Don’t move,” a light-humoured voice advised him. “You’ll upset Sym.”

He forced his eyes open and squinted in bright dawn light. He was in a small, clean hotel room furnished with two narrow beds. At his feet, the source of the resistance to his movement, lay a large brown labrador with sad, accusatory eyes. The other bed in the room was unoccupied and rumpled messily; the table beside it was littered with cosmetics and tissues. Between it and his bed sat a woman in a worn chintz chair, her guitar held across her knees. She had long red hair, naturally straight and draped over her shoulders; her flowing skirt and crocheted top displayed a fond remembrance of the previous decade.

“Hullo Sym,” he offered the dog a crooked smile and a scratch of apology behind the velveteen ear.

The woman laid her instrument aside and stood - it was only then that he noticed the decisive precision of her gestures. She took firm steps with her face turned towards the window and her hands held poised away from her body, fingers tense until they brushed the side of the bed. She patted her hand along its edge until her touch met Sym’s tail.

“Off, dog!” she laughed, her accent a melodic Central Belt lilt. Sym raised himself with a long-suffering groan and a flutter of his tail against his hocks. He jumped down and leant his body against her protectively.

Her blue eyes were the colour of a summer sky given depth by a haze of high cloud: he looked into her soft-cheeked face and realised with a pleasurable shock that he knew her. He recalled that her blindness left her with little picture of the world beyond a sense of where the light was, and he recalled her wicked schoolgirl laughter and her endless teasing of the fearful teachers tasked with taking care of her. The memory threw other pertinent questions into relief: what on earth was Christian Stewart doing in London, and what was he, Francis Crawford, doing in bed in her hotel room?

It would be some time before he remembered the stage invasion that had followed his disruption of Richard’s little gig; the night air crackling in his lungs as he pelted out of the venue’s back door and round the corner; the shock of a slow moving taxi ambushing him from the side. That Jenny Fleming - Morningside’s own Phaedra, the merriest of widows - had gallantly helped rescue him and convey him to the hotel room she shared with her niece was an embarrassing detail he’d be quite happy to remain ignorant of.


End file.
